Bing Hits The Road Running!

I probably would not have even looked at BING if it were not a thread on High Rankings. When it comes to SEO today and tomorrow and next week... My clients demand high Google ranking. I did a couple of searches on BING and was impressed. I will keep using Google. The question to any SEO professional is, "will everyone else?".

I'm not sure what you're looking for in an answer, but for the few of my sites I've checked in Bing the popup was simply some text snippets from the page, along with something similar to Google's SiteLinks down towards the bottom of the popup. I didn't personally see much rhyme or reason in the text selected. Though I didn't really look at it very closely either. I do have it on my radar screen dig into when I can find some time since one of my sites I checked had a lot of text snippets in the popups, others had a few sentences extracted and one, oddly enough, had zero text from the page content, but did have the links at the bottom still.

That's the one that made me want to look into it more closely.

I can't see any consistancy on where it pulls the data from and unfortunately I have noticed a flash site where it pops up as a bit of code and I can't find where the code is in on the page/movie.

I musta missed it, just don't see a thing here that doesn't change the fact they are in 3d place and working as hard as they can to stay there. You can say the King bought a spiffy new outfit, but I'm the kid in the corner and I say "That dude is still nekkid".

From that I would think not many have heard about or at least are using Bing yet, considering my sites have pretty much the same rankings on MSN, Live and Bing.

That said, I've never been in the crowd that says you should only pay attention to Google rankings. I have this aversion to putting all or even most of my eggs in one basket. So even if Y!, the various MS properties, Ask, etc only make up a potential 20% of my search generated traffic I'm certainly not going to ignore them. So what if G were to send 80%, I'm just not willing to flat out give up 20% of my search traffic simply because I'm too lazy to make the effort!

Of course I take the same approach with search vs non-search generated traffic too. I start to cringe if/when I ever have a site where search makes up half or more of its overall traffic. So I may just be weird.

umm... 60k per month isn't much traffic 1dmf. Seriously. Not if one faithfully follows the advice we always give to optimize for at least 100 phrases. Truth is, that's one of my smaller niche sites. A niche that nobody who is sane would even bother to target since it's not only a smallish niche but there are some rather large players (can you say Microsoft?) who offer something in the niche that is totally free.

Besides all of that, if you count only verifiable new unique traffic the SE numbers are more like 30k. So not nearly so lofty.

Still truth be told with all of the other traffic channels added in this one little niche site does get 'round about 100K brand spanking new unique visits per month. With an average new unique visitor conversion rate of 4% and an average customer value of $30.72 in 2008. Making the average value of each new unique visitor value just shy of $1.23 each. All within the first 30 days of first contact.

Plus everything is totally automated and web-delivered too, just as I like it. I get maybe 2 phone calls per week and maybe 4 or 5 emails per week. Otherwise the site runs itself, except of my twice per year inspection to make improvements and keep things rolling along smoothly. Let's just say I'm not complaining at the compensation vs the amount of time I have to put in.

Let's also say it's not an overnight process. This site started out with a few hundred search visitors per month a few years aog, and up until about a year and a half ago had a lowly 0.20% conversion rate! So it has taken considerable work to get it where it is now.

I'm working on ways now to increase the CR and AFTVV (Average First Time Visitor Value) to about double what they currently are. If I am able to pull that off, and I think I can, I'll be happy with that site. Then it'll probably be time either leave it alone or to sell if off and start on the next little project. Probably sell if off since I've had it for a few years now. I sell most of 'em off since for me the joy is in building it, not in running it and certainly not the money it generates.

Now with some of my larger not-quite-so-nichy-but-still-not-mainstream sites the new unique visitor numbers from search only are more in the 250,000 300,000 range per month. Excluding return visitors and alternate traffic channels. Those though tend to require more work on my part and the conversion rate is usually lucky to reach 3.5% to 4% because too many window shoppers find them. So there's not quite as much profit per hour of effort for me.

And people wonder why I prefer the really nichy sites, even though all agree they're less work. For myself I am continually baffled why those fluent in good SEO and marketing don't dip their toe into the retail side of things. It really is such easy money if you already have the skill set and a good idea or two.

yeah well if you think 60k a month is small fry, I might as well give up and go sweep roads!

But to be honest, the only SEO I do is 'on page', I've explained off page principles to friends and family who's sites I wrote for them (for nothing), but i'm not about to spend the rest of my life optimising and doing off page SEO for nothing as well.

you get out what you put in and as it takes alot more 'off page' activities than it does 'on page' not to mention creating continuos new content, I doubt i'll ever see those kind of figures!

Totally from the Bing disucssionumm... 60k per month isn't much traffic 1dmf. Seriously. Not if one faithfully follows the advice we always give to optimize for at least 100 phrases.

Good advice, but you neet to choose the right phrases! How would you do that Randy? I'm favouring the approach of looking at 1 miilion searches a month phrases with a few sub-phrases around the 100 000 mark. Then I shoot for the long tail, link em all, and there you go. Do this and you might get the core phrase and easily end up with 100 000 visitors a month without too much effort.

QUOTE(Randy @ Jun 9 2009, 03:34 PM)

Truth is, that's one of my smaller niche sites.

Yeah. You talk far too much sense not be scoring much bigger than that!

QUOTE(Randy @ Jun 9 2009, 03:34 PM)

Still truth be told with all of the other traffic channels added in this one little niche site does get 'round about 100K brand spanking new unique visits per month. With an average new unique visitor conversion rate of 4% and an average customer value of $30.72 in 2008. Making the average value of each new unique visitor value just shy of $1.23 each. All within the first 30 days of first contact.

Now I feel sick :-) I make about $0.30 per impression with AdSense. Then again, you are talking unique visitor -- what would the figure be per impression? 50 cents? Then AdSense looks more reasonable. Plus it's even less hassle -- I get no phone calls, and no emails!

QUOTE(Randy @ Jun 9 2009, 03:34 PM)

Let's also say it's not an overnight process. This site started out with a few hundred search visitors per month a few years aog, and up until about a year and a half ago had a lowly 0.20% conversion rate! So it has taken considerable work to get it where it is now.

Yeah, we all have to start somewhere. But if people take your advice I'm sure they could do something serious in a hundred days. As an AdSense whore, I'd just make the point that the AdSense conversion rate can be 100-200x times better, as long as you pick the right things to talk about and put the ads in the right place. (If you don't it's still likely to be 10x better). So it might be good to start with AdSense, just to see some money coming in steady & early. A great motivator. Then, perhaps, you could move to Randy's model, if you want to get your hands a little bit dirty and maybe earn a little bit more.

QUOTE(Randy @ Jun 9 2009, 03:34 PM)

I'm working on ways now to increase the CR and AFTVV (Average First Time Visitor Value) to about double what they currently are.

I guess I should be working on raising the value of the ads that show. But I'd rather write another page about something I'm interested in, or hang around in forums.

QUOTE(Randy @ Jun 9 2009, 03:34 PM)

Now with some of my larger not-quite-so-nichy-but-still-not-mainstream sites the new unique visitor numbers from search only are more in the 250,000 300,000 range per month. Excluding return visitors and alternate traffic channels. Those though tend to require more work on my part and the conversion rate is usually lucky to reach 3.5% to 4% because too many window shoppers find them. So there's not quite as much profit per hour of effort for me.

This is the kind of traffic I'm getting. I'm not working any harder. Maybe Adsense scales better? Maybe these medium sites could be converted to AdSense, while you put in the grunt labour on your nichy sites? The window shoppers might be more prepared to click on the ads, after all it's just more window shopping!

QUOTE(Randy @ Jun 9 2009, 03:34 PM)

And people wonder why I prefer the really nichy sites, even though all agree they're less work.

QUOTE(Randy @ Jun 9 2009, 03:34 PM)

For myself I am continually baffled why those fluent in good SEO and marketing don't dip their toe into the retail side of things. It really is such easy money if you already have the skill set and a good idea or two.

I don't wonder. The long tail is where it's at.

QUOTE(Randy @ Jun 9 2009, 03:34 PM)

For myself I am continually baffled why those fluent in good SEO and marketing don't dip their toe into the retail side of things. It really is such easy money if you already have the skill set and a good idea or two.